Lindsey Vonn should finally get to race Wednesday

Lindsey Vonn's first race should go off as scheduled Wednesday.

The women will almost certainly get to race for the first time at the Vancouver Games. Forecasts for the rest of the week call for drier weather, and that would allow officials to properly prepare the course for the downhill -- which Vonn enters as a heavy favorite despite the fact she arrived here with a painful shin injury.

"She's prepared to race when there's a race, that's for certain," her husband, Thomas Vonn, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "She'll be ready to go 100 percent. Now, if there was an option to have more time off, she would take it. But when there's no option, she'll be ready to compete."

Vonn, 25, has been alternately devastated and encouraged since she arrived in Canada a week ago -- and she hasn't even raced. Sunday, with the women's super combined wiped out by weather, she trained four runs of slalom and came away feeling great about the injury. Monday, she ran her first official training run -- a two-step process that involved skiing the top portion of the downhill course in the morning and the bottom in the afternoon -- and came away immediately feeling pain, and discouraged again.

"I think she got over that a little bit," Thomas Vonn said. "It definitely hurt, especially that big jump at the end. I think [the media] all caught her right when she finished, like five or 10 minutes later, and it was definitely a bit more negative than if she had time to get away and let the pain die down. Overall it was a good day."

She must be in ridiculous pain. I had that very same injury in the 90s and it was 6 months before I could walk with no pain. If the injury is bad enough, it's not uncommon to develop a hematoma, and if it's not drained right away, can take forever to heal.